Our Towns

By William Glaberson

Published: August 2, 1991

HARTFORD—
Rick Davey brought Little Miss 1565 home to her family this summer. It was 47 years after she died.

She was, though unnamed for nearly half a century, the most famous victim of one of the worst fires in American history: the burst of flame in the big top of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus on Barbour Street here on July 6, 1944. It left 168 people dead and memories of terror and innocence tangled together in a circus tent.

Rick Davey is a reserved, 43-year-old man with three sons of his own whose job, as a lieutenant in the Hartford Fire Marshal's office, is to investigate fires.

But his job, he says, had little to do with what he did for the child he now calls by the name he gave back to her, Eleanor. Eleanor Emily Cook, who was 8 years old that summer afternoon.

It started for him nine and a half years ago with a Fire Department assignment to give a school talk about the circus fire. But it soon turned into a search for the identity of the girl who was known only by her morgue number. In time, he said, the search turned into an obsession that took up much of his off-duty time, cost him thousands of dollars and was often tedious and frustrating.

"She became family to me," he said. "She is, in effect, a surrogate daughter. I spent more time looking for her than she was alive."

In the aftermath of the fire, people passed through the hospitals and the makeshift morgue at the Armory looking for their loved ones. Sixty- seven of the dead were children, some burned be yond recognition.

Six bodies were never identified. Of those, one was so unmarred by the fire, she looked as though she might have drifted off to sleep. The morgue photograph of her slightly smudged face was pub lished all over the world.

Lieutenant Davey un raveled some of the great fire's unanswered ques tions, coming to believe that the cause may have been arson rather than the stray cigarette blamed at the time. But it was that photograph that captured him. He made a promise to track down every lead to bring the girl home.

He never told anyone about that promise, he said. Then, he corrected himself. "I talked to her about it all the time," he said. "To do it, I had to have an emotional bond and I did. It was to a photograph of a little angel."

The lieutenant is a hardened firefighter, said John R. Vendetta, the Hartford Fire Marshal. But there was something about the little girl. "He's going to hate like hell if I tell you this," Chief Vendetta said, "but his eyes have welled up when he's talked about her."

Lieutenant Davey reconstructed the work of long-dead investigators. He talked to hundreds of the 7,000 people who were in the tent. He studied photographs, hospital records, scraps of paper, death certificates. He went down dead ends.

And then, in one of the mounds of documents, there was an unlabeled photograph. Lieutenant Davey does not remember where he found it anymore. But now he knows how it got into somebody's pile of fire leftovers: It was the photograph of the little girl with ribbons in her hair that Eleanor's aunt, Emily Gill, brought to Hartford from Southhampton, Mass.

Mrs. Gill carried that photograph around in the frantic search that afternoon for the little missing girl whose mother, Mildred Cook, lay unconscious in a hospital with burns over 90 percent of her body. Lieutenant Davey believes that Mrs. Gill never saw the corpse numbered 1565.

With time and toil, he concluded that the girl with the ribbons was the girl in the morgue photo and that she was probably the sister of Edward Cook, a 6-year-old boy who had died in the fire, and the daughter of the badly burned Mildred Cook, long separated from the girl's father.

Five hundred letters later, Lieutenant Davey found Donald Cook this winter. Now 56 and living in Granger, Iowa, he is the only one of the three Cook children who escaped the fire. On March 8, 1991, the Connecticut State Medical Examiner ruled that corpse 1565 was Eleanor.

For years after they buried Edward, Donald Cook said recently, he and his mother, who survived her burns after months of hospitalization, believed that Eleanor might return. In his teens, he said, he came to believe that his sister was really the girl with the number buried in Northwood Cemetery near Hartford with the other unnamed victims. But the authorities refused to listen to him.

His mother, Donald Cook said, "had a hope that eventually she'd show up -- loss of memory, something like that."

She did show up in the end. In June, Donald Cook and Mildred Cook, who is 85, and Lieutenant Davey reburied a little girl in her family's plot in Southhampton. Over the grave it says Eleanor Emily Cook.

Photos: Flames bursting from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Hartford on July 6, 1944. Rick Davey with a photo of Eleanor Emily Cook. (Steve Miller for The New York Times)